In May 2014, the employees of a Chinese direct marketing company were treated to a vacation on the west coast of the United States. They visited Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas, sightseeing and shopping as Chinese tour groups do. With one big difference...
There were 7,000 of them.
They took 86 flights, stayed in 26 hotels, and generated around US$85 million of revenue and economic value for the state of California.
China tourism in California has exploded over the past few years. As the chart below shows, annual increases in Chinese tourists have been running well into the double digits year-on-year.
This year, an estimated 1.5 million Chinese tourists will visit California, about an 11 percent increase over last year. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that by 2021, that figure will increase to 2.3 million, who will spend approximately US$6.1 billion in the state.
And Chinese tourists aren't just buying Starbucks lattes and t-shirts. Increasingly, they're buying two things...
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Good investing,
Tama
